ONLINE GAMING GETS HUGE
t’s easy to take online gaming for granted nowadays.
Industry juggernauts like Microsoft, Sony and Valve have integrated it into their systems and services seamlessly, and it allows us to do whatever we want, from taking part in massively multiplayer experiences, to pitting our wits and skills against a friend in one-on-one battles. Most online services make it incredibly easy to chat with friends, access high scores and find out more about the games you want to play, but it hasn’t always been like this as Doom’s director Tom Hall remembers. “I played a primitive deathmatch game called MazeWar in the CompSci Building of the University Of Wisconsin-Madison,” he tells us. “It had networked multiplayer for free – the computers were already connected to the mainframe. It was pretty cool to see another player, but ‘battles’ were usually over quickly.”
Online gaming largely progressed in those early days of gaming, thanks to games like MUD (Multi-User Dungeon) but as the Seventies gave way to the Eighties, progress slowly continued to be made. However, it wasn’t until the Nineties that more gamers began to venture online, and even then it wasn’t easy. “Early on, it was getting networking working of course,” continues Tom when we ask him about the biggest obstacles developers faced when taking games like Doom online. “Also educating players on how to connect, since it was a little arcane, with all the IPX (Internetwork Packet Exchange) stuff. Then the challenge was matchmaking, which was a business for DWANGO until the internet properly took off. Remember, folks might not have the hardware to talk to other computers, or they were downloading games off bulletin board systems, which took forever. This was taking the early baby steps from stuff that computer
